Amazon’s out, but I’m still in: Blas

Hizzoner won’t rule out 2020 run

The epic collapse of the Amazon deal that he and Gov. Cuomo brokered behind closed doors won’t keep Mayor de Blasio from running for president, he said Sunday.

“I have not ruled it out,” de Blasio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

De Blasio repeatedly bashed Amazon for its unexpected Thursday announcement, which he called “arbitrary and unfair to working people.”

“If I made an agreement with you, and there were issues that came up, but we had an agreement, you wouldn’t call me in the dead of night and say, ‘Hey, we’re taking our marbles and we’re going home,’ ” he said.

De Blasio said the move confirmed “people’s worst fears about corporate America.

“Here’s the 1 percent dictating to everyone else, even though we gave them a fair deal,” he said.

But the mayor also said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DBronx, Queens) was wrong when she claimed Amazon’s decision to abandon plans for the Long Island City office complex would free up $3 billion to fix the city’s subways and hire more teachers.

And de Blasio agreed when show host Chuck Todd noted that tax incentives — such as the $3 billion offered to Amazon — are often misunderstood to be available funds, or “money you had over here, and it was going over there.” “Correct,” the mayor said. “And that $3 billion that would go back in tax incentives was only after we were getting the jobs and getting the revenue.”

In addition to mentioning the “1 percent” five times, de Blasio described himself as a “proud progressive” and used the words “progressive” or “progressives” another 13 times during the 8¹/2- minute interview.

De Blasio denied that the Amazon debacle — which will cost the city and state an estimated $27 billion in revenues — would make it harder for him to seek the White House.

“I don’t think anything about the Amazon decision affects the bigger debate in this country about the fact, if we don’t address this income inequality, our country’s security and stability is threatened,” he said.

Hizzoner also pledged to “take this message nationally, any way you slice it,” adding, “I feel a real urgency about this.”

De Blasio’s criticism of fellow progressive Ocasio-Cortez came after Todd suggested there was a “factual divide” that kept her from understanding “how this deal worked.”

Todd played a video clip of her saying, “If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money, if we wanted to.”